Goodreads

Month: January 2017

This post will not make any sense to people who don’t know Dr. House from House M.D. and Rachel from Friends. Friends aired from 1994 to 2004 and House M.D. aired from 2004 to 2012. House appeared on Friends in season 4 i.e. 1997 long before the House series and the short video clip(can be found by clicking here) is quite hilarious.

If you think about the time when he appeared on Friends, at that time people have called him, “some guy sitting next to Rachel on the airplane”, since he was just another guy who did a short role with Rachel (quite a superstar back then). Now anyone from a newer generation if watched that same clip he would call “some girl sitting next to Dr. House on the airplane”.

Gregory House– a witty, arrogant, rule-breaking, self-destructive, pain-pill addicted but genius diagnostician at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey. House and his team of doctors work against the clock to diagnose and treat patients when other doctors can’t seem to figure out what’s wrong with them, often resorting to unorthodox methods based on House’s hunches on the patients, their families, or his own personal experiences.

YouTube suggestions work in mysterious ways, I have no idea why I started getting “House M.D.” video clips some weeks ago on my YouTube home page. House T.V series started from 2004 and ended in 2012 and there is no reason which I can think of on top of my head which could explain their appearance on my YouTube.

As always I watched a couple of videos and I started to like them. I am a big fan of Sherlock (T. V. series and movie) and House resembled with them in so many ways. Extremely intelligent, annoying and humorous at the same time and other features made me watch a couple more of the clips. Finally, I decided to watch the series and last week I watched 16 episodes of the first season.

The story is about a doctor who solves cases which other doctors can’t solve with a team of 3 doctors in Sherlocky way. I actually am learning so much about diseases, antibiotics, and other stuff which I would never have heard otherwise.

Napoleon, the Third Emperor of France and nephew of the great Napoleon, boasted that in spite of all his royal duties he could remember the name of every person he met.How to Win Friends and Influence People

A person’s name is the single most beautiful word for him in the universe. And it’s true for everyone but seldom we realize it and often we forget people’s name whom we meet on every other day. We think it’s not important, we think it doesn’t matter, but we are wrong in that.

Remember how happy you become when the teacher remembered your name in your school days, remember how awesome you felt at that time. Do you remember how you talked about that incident with your friends and family when the professor made it obvious that he remembered you by name?
In spite of reading this book several times, I still find it very difficult to remember people’s names and I still am bad at it but I am improving nevertheless.

If I were to write the autobiography of Donald Trump in today’s time the title would be quite different, we would call it the sociopath.

Tony SchwartzCo-author of Trump: The Art of the Deal (The New York Times Best Seller)

I didn’t follow the US elections, and if you are not an American citizen or if you do not live there, there is no reason why you should follow. That said, you must have heard about Donald Trump, as he managed to piss almost every other person I know (Actually I don’t even know one person who was in favor of him). And now he is the president of one of the most powerful nations on Earth.!!

I know it’s an old news.

A couple of days ago one of my dear friends shared a podcast with me which I could not resist sharing with you. It’s a small audio (around 15 minutes) containing facts and analysis of things spoken by the president of the most powerful nation on Earth.

It was funny when he was running for the president now it’s scary.(click here to listen).

Yeah, I am talking about planets of another star. It is one of those complicated things which I have read from the book “Origins” by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith. I would have explained it here but then it would become too technical too soon and I doubt if I would be able to explain in totality.

Think about it the nearest star after Sun is 4.37 light years away from Sun and we are talking about finding out if it has planets or not. The author also shared the methods and techniques used to find if these stars have any planets and I was completely sure that it would all go over my head but to my utmost surprise, I actually got it and it was a really good physics problem (kind of like the ones which we used to solve when we were preparing for IIT)

In those says, I used to lack motivation in solving those difficult questions and always thought how those problems might be helpful in any way other than getting to know which one among us has high IQ. I wish somebody would have told me at that time that if you would do it efficiently one day you would be able to uncover the greatest mysteries of the universe (I mean literally)

I am more than halfway through the book “Origins” by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith. The starting was pretty amazing and pushed me to read further and further. Then after a couple of chapters, it became insanely technical and it seemed that I would not be able to even complete the book. But I kept reading in spite of getting nothing out of it. I have done the same thing with my textbooks in my college days hoping that I would get it eventually.

This time with this book after some chapters things started to become interesting and currently, I am reading planet formations, stories of how nebulas were discovered, how the moons were made etc meaning I am finally enjoying it now.

When I first heard about Quasars and Blazars, the brightest thing in the universe I was on my toes to know more about them. I was extremely excited to start this book after watching this video(link here). And finally, Neil has uncovered their existence in the book. It was awesome, it was beautiful, it felt like I was there.

Coincidently today was the 100th day of Microsoft OneNote on my devices. I switched from EverNote to OneNote on 2nd Oct 2016 because I couldn’t use EverNote on 3 devices at a time (click here to know more about it).

In spite of a bulky interface and thousands of unusable options, heavy battery usage, and other minor bugs I continued to use OneNote thinking that I would get used to it.

But not anymore.

Today I reached my threshold of tolerance when I updated the OneNote just to paste one line from my mailbox and I was not able to do it. I mean seriously.! That’s the one damn thing why it even exists, it’s a tool which people use to store (copy & paste) useful data to use later. If the application can’t even get that thing straight what’s the whole point of using the damn thing?

And Today I have switched it to Google Keep and I am loving it.! It is built keeping the user in mind. In less than first 30 minutes, I got the whole idea. It does not have fancy features but it has what I needed the most. Below are some of the features which may seem trivial but are actually very effective and useful.

Pinning the notes to front- extremely useful for people who take a lot of notes

TODO list- again, trivial but it’s simplicity made me love it

Free all across the devices, and

Very fast

It’s like love at first sight and since I am using it after OneNote I love it even more.

Reading one-third of the book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie and completing half of the book “Origins” by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

I have been away from reading books from a couple of weeks and I was feeling terrible about it. Finally, this Sunday I filled my brain with some useful knowledge and I feel extremely awesome about it. This is the third time I am reading the book “How to Win Friends and Influence People“and every time I have read it I got something useful from it.

What happens in daily life is that we often forget what have learned in the past but we still think and behave as if we are applying what we have learned. But more often than not we forget things and also forget that we have forgotten about it (a terrible situation). Upon rereading the book we find things which we didn’t discover when we read it for the first or second time and our beliefs also change meaning the wiring in the brain strengthens every time we read which in turn make us more confident in our belief system.

We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.

-Tyler Durden, Fight Club

I have a chair which is almost 13 years old, I purchased it when I was in eighth grade. It’s not in a great shape but it does it’s job pretty effectively. I am in my hometown, we have pretty old utensils, and most of them even are a decade old.

With that said, since the day technology took over the world, we are buying much more rapidly than ever. I was in ninth grade when my mother bought a smartphone for me. It was my first smartphone, and since then I have bought a smartphone every year. Each of them ranging from Rs 10,000 to Rs 18,000. I have bought 3 laptops till now each worth around Rs 50,000 on average.

And it’s not just me.

It is now considered normal to have one smartphone each year, and one laptop in every couple of years. I guess the marketing guys finally got how to market the product (at least in technology). I am pretty sure they are working really hard to make us all-star consumers in other sectors too.

It’s obvious that whoever is living with you matters, but when I read about the behavioural changes in ourselves when we lives with another person in the book Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman it made me rethink the time spent with those people who have lived with me in the past and how they have influenced me for the better or the worse.

The thing is that we subconsciously mimic the other person whether we like it or not. Sound bizarre.?

It actually is.

But then when I analyzed my behavior in the past it kind of makes sense. The interesting thing is that while you are subconsciously mimicking the other person, the other person is also busy mimicking you subconsciously irrespective of whether he likes you or not.

I would have suggested choosing your partner carefully but then I remembered, you already knew that but I bet you had no idea that you have been mimicking your room partner the whole time.